News tagged with dynasty

Russian scientists staged a rare anti-government demonstration Saturday as fears mount that they will be next in the line of fire after Kremlin crackdowns on the media, rights activists and the opposition.

What do an accelerator complex at Cern, a manufacturing center in 19th century Philadelphia and lotus cultivation during the Qing dynasty all have in common? All such activities generate knowledge and know-how. And all of ...

Actually the lotus is a very ordinary plant. Nevertheless, during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) a complex bureaucratic structure was built up around this plant. The lotus was part of the Imperial Household, the palace machine ...

British judges on Friday finally ended a bitter debate over the burial of king Richard III, ruling that his remains should be laid to rest in a cathedral in the city where they were found under a car park.

Human beings would probably be known as pilosals rather than mammals if Carl Linnaeus had not been a proponent of breast-feeding. For social and political reasons, the famed taxonomist labeled the class of animals to which ...

A joint expedition of scientists led by Chapurukha M. Kusimba of The Field Museum and Sloan R. Williams of the University of Illinois at Chicago has unearthed a 600-year-old Chinese coin on the Kenyan island of Manda that ...

A study by the Genographic Project has shown that not all individuals carrying the Romanian "Basarab" surname, the first dynasty of Wallachian kings that included the real-life Dracula, can be direct biological descendants ...

Dynasty

A dynasty is a sequence of rulers considered members of the same family. Historians traditionally consider many sovereign states' history within a framework of successive dynasties, e.g., China, Ancient Egypt and the Persian Empire. Much of European political history is dominated by dynasties such as the Carolingians, the Capetians, the Bourbons, the Habsburgs, the Stuarts, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs. Until the 19th century, it was taken for granted that a legitimate function of a monarch was to aggrandize his dynasty; that is, to increase the territory, wealth and power of family members.

A dynasty is also often called a house (e.g., House of Saud and House of Windsor), and may be described as imperial, royal, ducal or comital depending upon the chief title borne by its rulers. Dynasty is also used to refer to the era during which a family reigned, as well as events, trends and artifacts of that period (e.g. "Ming dynasty vase"). In such cases, often "dynasty" is dropped, while the name is used adjectively; e.g., Tudor style, Ottoman expansion, Romanov decadence, etc.

While contemporary English includes references to an array of prominent or influential families as dynasties, in much of the world, dynasty has been associated with monarchy and defined patrilineally. Kinship and inheritance were predominantly viewed and legally calculated through descent from a common ancestor in the male line. However, men descended from a dynasty through females have sometimes adopted the name of that dynasty while claiming its position or inheritance (e.g., House of Orange, House of Bagration, House of Habsburg-Lorraine).